When I join a forum where I intend to post on-topic statements and share valuable info at the same time as spreading a sig link to my money-making sites the thing that MOST drives me to sign up and post is when they have rules saying things like "if you put advertising on our site we'll lynch you and eat your heart with some ketchup".

The more nastily they say "we'll hurt you if you 'spam' us" the more intent I am of seeing if what i do offends them. It's like this - there's very little to lose from it, and if every time someone puts a rude warning on their site I go away, I'm just encouraging people to believe that being rude is the most appropriate way to keep your site 'clean'.

I say this because I just signed up to a forum after reading this in its rules:

No advertising - ever! If you've just come here to sell stuff without contributing anything to the forum, you may well be gagged and offending posts removed.

That made me REALLY want to post there as much as possible.

Forum owners ought to think about that.

After all, any decent forum owner can make good money the more on-topic posts there are, so if I'm gonna go and help THEM make money, what makes them so righteous about stopping me getting a tiny bit back (very little compared to what the content makes for they themselves - plus they make money off ME when i click ads on their site that i may be interested in, their own ads, I mean).

I've had this thought thousands of times, but today I thought I'd just air it.

A lot of people are abusive about people in advertising, but well - consider your mother or father or grandfather/mother...

whatever job they did or do, whatever company they own or owned - it had to be advertised. they wouldn't have fed you without advertising. yet somehow so many people are "better" (in their minds) than me and my fellow advertisers!

That's my 40 cents for the hour.

I think you're generally right, but there are a few nits that can be picked. In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate,

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

It's like this - there's very little to lose from it

I can think of 2 things they can do. The first is a nuisance lawsuit - it would be thrown out (or maybe not even launched, depending on whether both people or sites are in the same country) but occupy your resources. The second is a lot more salient. They can create a page and title it with your name and "is a spammer". If they've got enough members, or respect from Google, that's probably not a good thing for your reputation. Anyway, it's hardly the end of the world, either, but, again, Devil's Advocate and all - it's something they can do in response, if people choose to be as nasty as their warnings.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

After all, any decent forum owner can make good money the more on-topic posts there are, so if I'm gonna go and help THEM make money, what makes them so righteous about stopping me getting a tiny bit back (very little compared to what the content makes for they themselves - plus they make money off ME when i click ads on their site that i may be interested in, their own ads, I mean).

If they have ads, it's probably a little harder to make the argument (although house rules is still a trump card, I guess), but what if a forum is being run purely for hobby? I never used the AdSense revenue sharing here, I just want to learn about this new communications technology that's the industrial revolution of our age.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

whatever job they did or do, whatever company they own or owned - it had to be advertised. they wouldn't have fed you without advertising. yet somehow so many people are "better" (in their minds) than me and my fellow advertisers!

I'd bet that's pretty close to true, today. Chris Rock mentions in one of his stand up routines, that people don't sell drugs. Drugs sell themselves. On the other hand, people are talking about the danger from this recession, in that advertising leads to sales, but it's being treated the other way around.

Nobody can launch a "nuisance lawsuit" if a person joins a forum, posts a relevant post or a couple of relevant posts and gets banned merely for advertising a website in a one-line link in the signature of his posts.**** He/she could probably counter-sue (after the initial case being thrown out) for wasting his/her time. The court might feel quite uspet about their time being wasted too.

Any post with genuine content and a sig link at the bottom is an ordinary post. And people who don't like them number at 10% approximately of forum owners I have encountered - figures show so far. People send emails with their sig at the bottom. There is as much "nuisance" in a sig link on a post as a url at the bottom of your email in your signature there.

They can create a page and title it with your name and "is a spammer".

And then I can sue THEM for libel/defamation, which would cost them a LOT since my business is dependent on the web, and there is no definition of spam that says if you are someone i write emails to after we have agreed to exchange emails, then i can't put a link at the bottom of it.


Anyway, it doesn't matter. I was just letting off steam because whenever I see one of those "we will hunt spammers" notices I know, although they mostly/usually/perhaps-almost-always mean to aim it at strange idiots who turn up, post a mass of 70 unrelated words with links to viagra, porn and god knows what else, with no 'human' content at all, nothing discernable, what it does is create a culture of bitter hateful language used against people who use the same branding technique as COCA COLA who make their brand known by showing people the logo/name as much as they can whenever they can.


Your use of the word "nuisance" is exactly an example of how THOROUGHLY this bigotry has worked so far, and on you too! You believe that by putting a link in a signature, and making sure that WHEREVER I GO I use that signature, I am being a potential nuisance.

If I make a post on an issue I know about, one way or other, then fair enough, if the house rule is that they just don't want ANY competing affiliate links or competing pay per click link-slides (nice word, eh?) (wonder what the right one is), they can remove me. I don't deny them the right. But the use of abusive language and words that make even webmasters like you start bandying the word nuisance about as though it wasn't synonymous with actual criminality and therefore not something you hurl around willy nilly above all without any real assessment of the innocence or guilty of an individual, is what I object to, and all I was saying was that when people do that, THAT's when I like to go - "fine, you'll ban me, great. but before you do that, I'll piss you off. Then we're even" - otherwise, just walking away is like accepting a ban in advance. It's only fair to balance their hatred with something to make it warranted!

Still, no point grumbling. I've done about 30000 hours of work since then, compared to what I gather most people end up getting paid off their traffic, now I'm starting to see the competition without the fog of so many distracting market trends. I was going to post a post on my opinions about advertising and privacy and "the cult of personality", but this post had to be written instead, in the name of defending the rights of advertisers to do EXACTLY WHAT COCA COLA does, legitimately but permanently in your face, without being insulted - nobody out of these people actually would say that you could DREAM of suing coca cola for being a nuisance by forcing their logo in your face 1000s of times a month everywhere you go, on buses, street corners, in shops, on walls, on television, on your computer.

Yet if someone else does the same stuff, all legit and legal and above board, at least 30% of people call it spam or nuisance etc etc etc.

AS they gulp down their coca cola. That's just... I don't know the word. It's not hypocrisy completely, it's a form of hypocrisy I suppose. But there's something else it is that goes way beyond that - tame subservience. That's what. Tame subservience to those who want to promote the idea that if you already have money you have a right to it and if you don't, you can't do anything to get any or the big boys will crush you. I've worked in top city offices where sales people use every last "usp" from the devil's handbook to get paid - from faking weddings to using different racial names (to prevent racism messing up a sale).

I saw a sales manager talk a divorcee who was seeing his kids for the first time in years, to book a business conference at that time instead. He gloated about it and pretended to feel guilty. But he was just trying to show how good at manipulation he was.

And HE's widely respected, powerful and never called "a nuisance" - simply because those who have money like to keep a strong current of misconception and preconception flowing around the millions of poor people so that nobody who may have a chance of rising up can do so without facing a THOROUGH beating first.

Some of us can stand that beating. Hope I don't sound like I'm telling you off. If you are a webmaster, then I'm defending you too - against the sorts of people who would go out of their way to make sure YOU never have enough money, unless you are willing to kiss their behind and sit in their office, earning huge amounts more FOR THEM than they'll ever pay you. We all have a right to our independence and we all have a right to use all the methods used at the very top of the financial food chain. The only question is how long any of us can stand the pressure. Anywhere where there's real money, there is pressure pushing down hard on you.

I respect email marketers just like any other marketers, but they are SO downtrodden in terms of their reputation and the way the world perceives the mail they send. That's why their conversions are so low and why there is such a massive grey area about doing something that will come across like spam vis a vis genuinely advertising to people in no more a nuisance way than coca cola.

It is not illegal for someone to send a flyer to you via your letter box. Yet on the web, far less intrusive things than that are frequently "blocked out" and labelled spam. It is a catching disease, this glib generalisation that anything you don't like is 'spam' or criminal. I don't like flyers. Even if I put a "no flyers" sign on my door they'll come anyway - they always do. No law can stop them coming through my door. Yet look how quickly people (eg the person above) assume that something FAR FAR LESS intrusive and not even unsolicited (you join their forum, they tacitly invite you to speak) can legitimately be labelled as far worse than a flyer through your door.

THE FLYER IS MUCH WORSE - and it is not illegal and never will be. Don't let the &*£$*@(£ get you down! That's what I say. It's our right to work hard and be rich. To them, your hard work only counts if you do it for someone in a corporation. Well screw the corporations. I've only ever seen them abuse and exploit people (he says, following his post with a link to dozens of big corporations, who will PAY HIM, when his work is done - but then again, THAT ain't illegal either, just part of the same evil everyone else's hands are dirty with).


I rest my case.



****Actually what they usually do is just to censor your signature and tell you not to do it again: in which case I don't post there any more. But the minority DO issue a ban because they are too lazy or technically illiterate to manage the feat of censorship without feeling put upon. Either way it's not spam, it's just their personal choice, it's just censorship. I don't post on muslim forums because they censor me too - eg if I talk about (as a muslim) personal issues. They censor me if they don't like something I say (eg talking openly about sex). It's their right, but it's not me that's doing anything wrong - I'm just doing what they don't like - that is sooo different to spamming. The person, in my opinion, with the problem in such cases is the censor. But I'm quite extreme in my beliefs in what should be opensource - far more than software. Even the government and police should be 100% transparent and opensource! The culture of concealment is what BREEDS the problem, not what eliminates it.

Enough already. This will take weeks for most people to read all the way to the end! Sorry.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

Nobody can launch a "nuisance lawsuit" if a person joins a forum, posts a relevant post or a couple of relevant posts and gets banned merely for advertising a website in a one-line link in the signature of his posts.

I think you're misreading me. Maybe "nuisance lawsuit" is a Yankee term, since most people would say we're the most litigious country in the world. A nuisance lawsuit is one without merit. It's a nuisance instead of a tragedy, because you win or it gets thrown out, but still wastes your time, and you still need to hire a lawyer. In the USA, anybody can sue anyone for anything, although they aren't guaranteed to win. Many people take advantage of that fact. A nuisance lawsuit means being a nuisance, by suing.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

And then I can sue THEM for libel/defamation, which would cost them a LOT since my business is dependent on the web, and there is no definition of spam that says if you are someone i write emails to after we have agreed to exchange emails, then i can't put a link at the bottom of it.

Again, you may be able to sue for libel in this situation, but you aren't likely to win. There's no clear definition, like you said, for who is and isn't a spamdexer. The same is true for being "mean", too, so it comes down to a person expressing an opinion that another person is or is not an X, Y, or Z. Libel has a very clear legal definition - asserting things that are false to be true, with the intention of harming another's reputation. If being a spammer can't be proven true, it also can't be proven false. Also, truth is an (absolute) defense against libel and slander charges.

And keep in mind I'm not calling you a spammer, a bad person, or anything else. I'm only pointing out facts and ideas in response to what you've posted. The purpose of playing Devil's Advocate is to help people find potential flaws in an idea, if any are there.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

although they mostly/usually/perhaps-almost-always mean to aim it at strange idiots who turn up, post a mass of 70 unrelated words with links to viagra, porn and god knows what else

That's exactly why those messages are there, and you'd be shocked how much of that garbage we remove every day. When someone types that box up, they're not thinking about people like you at all.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

Your use of the word "nuisance" is exactly an example of how THOROUGHLY this bigotry has worked so far, and on you too! You believe that by putting a link in a signature, and making sure that WHEREVER I GO I use that signature, I am being a potential nuisance.

To repeat, nuisance lawsuit is a US colloqualism, and means the lawsuit itself is a nuisance, not whatever triggered the suit.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

I saw a sales manager talk a divorcee who was seeing his kids for the first time in years, to book a business conference at that time instead. He gloated about it and pretended to feel guilty. But he was just trying to show how good at manipulation he was. And HE's widely respected, powerful and never called "a nuisance"

If it makes you feel any better, I can think of far worse things than nuisance that would apply to the person you just described.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

simply because those who have money like to keep a strong current of misconception and preconception flowing around the millions of poor people so that nobody who may have a chance of rising up can do so without facing a THOROUGH beating first.

On the other hand, advertising is not the great savior to end poverty, or even pull millions of poor people out of poverty!

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

Some of us can stand that beating.

Some type of metaphorical beating tends to go along with success in business, though. The people who are successful tend to be the people who stand up to it best. I guess that's just survival of the fittest.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

earning huge amounts more FOR THEM than they'll ever pay you.

That's also just capitalism. I promise you, any clerk in a store making $10 an hour, is bringing a lot more than $10 an hour to the bottom line of the company that employs them. Else the company would be unprofitable and go out of business. The same is true of movie actors, advertizing, and all industry. Everybody is out to make a profit.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

We all have a right to our independence and we all have a right to use all the methods used at the very top of the financial food chain.

You've said that a few times, usually alluding to Coca Cola, and I'm not following this particular thought? Coke pays hundreds of millions of dollars for advertising, with contracts signed by the companies they buy their adverts from, and whatever media outlets they ultimately run on. I don't see how explicitly trading (lots and lots of) cash for ad spots is anything like signature links in forums?

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

I respect email marketers just like any other marketers, but they are SO downtrodden in terms of their reputation and the way the world perceives the mail they send. That's why their conversions are so low and why there is such a massive grey area about doing something that will come across like spam vis a vis genuinely advertising to people in no more a nuisance way than coca cola.

Again, I don't follow? For whatever it's worth, I get plenty of email from companies I've done business with, and given permission to email me. I also get plenty of unsolicited commercial email, and always report it as spam. Fortunately, I don't get harassed by telemarketers - the "do not call list" seems to have been a resounding success.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

It is not illegal for someone to send a flyer to you via your letter box.

We're drifting away from the subject, but, on that note, it absolutely should be!

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

Yet on the web, far less intrusive things than that are frequently "blocked out" and labelled spam.

That people will react to things is a given - that's just cause and effect. If 90 % or more of people feel like a random email saying "Hey! I'm entitled to your money! Buy my v1@gra!!" is an encroachment, a clever marketer also listens, and will stop doing something that doesn't work.

Originally Posted by witnesstheday

But I'm quite extreme in my beliefs in what should be opensource - far more than software. Even the government and police should be 100% transparent and opensource! The culture of concealment is what BREEDS the problem, not what eliminates it.

And on this, we're in complete agreement.

Well, at least you're part of the peace revolution at heart. I can't read the whole of your reply just now because I've used up my last free time minutes and I have to switch the chess clock back to my turn (to get on with my job).

Hey, do you play chess? I'll give you a game online some time... was it not yourself who doesn't dig the television malarkey? One of these days - I'm getting rusty and besides I need to learn some new strategies, the tired old ones won't work much these days. I always played better as black, virtually always used my queen to mow down the opponent, often viciously sacrificing my queen to take out the opponent queen at the least expected time, in order to throw the opponent whilst I savage him/her from all sides. Sadly, when you get older, you start to realise the Queen's much better to keep alive! The victory tends to be pyrhhic all the way if you sacrifice the chief first - the soldiers and their lieutenants all die in her wake. So I need to learn to play and use the black Queen to protect the black King instead of always sending her out to mow down the white one!

Now that you know my strategy, the opensource chessgame can start, unless you have a pre-planned strategy you wanna share!

Anyway. Tick tock... there goes the clock. See ya one of these weeks. If not soon then have a good xmas! Wow, only two weeks ago. Did America dream of a Black (president-elect) Christmas in the past I wonder? Well, they must have, otherwise why would they have voted it in?

God save the queen and all that!

On the other hand, advertising is not the great savior to end poverty, or even pull millions of poor people out of poverty!

I'll have to read the rest later since I'm cutting into borrowed type and may need to ensure I do sleep despite my desire to not waste too much time on that sport.

But I thought I'd share this notion with you - if a company made enough money and had enough global retail control, if it happened to be in the right hands, that might be EXACTLY what it would do - if it was built by someone who built it for EXACTLY that purpose, and I'll not beat about the bush - that has ALWAYS been my purpose. But who knows how many decades I have to face before I can even create something big enough to be a trigger, let alone the whole friggin gun - aimed at the head of suffering, I mean.

The actual plan is to install the company and a wide variety of companies aligned to it, a lot of them in fields massively covered in this forum, in Palestine itself, the epicentre of poverty and deprivation, and its satellites in Sudan, South America, various parts of South Asia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, modern-Iraq (it wasn't third world until this century), places in short where a huge discrepancy in I.T. infrastructure vis-a-vis the outside world opens up Murdoch-esque monopolistic opportunities for the right woman or man (or transexual... hey, why judge?) etc. Anyway, enough of the peace talk. It's war out here. Money is more important than love and blood and the soul, to most people, which makes it really hard to get your share and STILL be a good lad. One HAS to be a good lad. Or lady.

I've made my own "rules and regulations" for me to apply to message boards which are below optimum quality (eg webmaster talk is WELL above optimum quality - o.q. means that the board serves a true purpose and isn't just a way for morons to waste their time and make other morons earn some income at the same time)

Is your forum a pointless excuse for making google adsense money by getting as many young or old people as possible outside the working world to spend most of their time exchanging meaningless phatic messages across a board so that you can expand your internet presence and your traffic?

Don't bother making stupid claims about what you'll do to spammers: we will spam you - and we will never stop - and eventually you'll go to hell and stop wasting the internet you total fools.

I've also noticed that posting as a female gets you an increased chance of people reading, reviewing, bumping and indeed 'respecting' your post. Posting with a jewish name may also have some kind of positive influence, so I'll give it a go.

Generally post with white names - and you'll be safe. It's a rule I've found works.

(The real problem with forums is that they are usually just petty-tyrannies - impotent people with no lives use forums as a way to imagine they have some power - words like 'banning' and 'mods' and 'infraction' give them a sense of self-importance which they feed on and use as to bolster their underconfident low-self-esteem personalities... but what I find in MOST such forums I go to is that there are only a few dozen people who actually post all the time - just a few dozen - of course there's always lots of spectators, but on petty tyrant forums you'll notice that no matter how large the membership the bulk of posts come from a handful of people who apparently think everyone thinks they're cool - they don't have any real idea what the 1000s of spectators really think, often a far cry from what the "mods" and forum "owners" and key posters think it is... webmaster-talk has so many posters day in day out that you can see it's a true hub of information exchange, but 99% of forums are quite different - trust me, I spend all my time using them to raise my income levels at the expense of total morons with no lives).

hey noob I've already won two chess games waiting for you... the longer you leave it the less likely it is you will beat me... which I regret as much as you... there's nothing worse in life than a lack of challenges. Still, I doubt I'll ever run dry of those.

(The real problem with forums is that they are usually just petty-tyrannies - impotent people with no lives use forums as a way to imagine they have some power - words like 'banning' and 'mods' and 'infraction' give them a sense of self-importance which they feed on and use as to bolster their underconfident low-self-esteem personalities.

Hey I resemble that remark

I'm sorry, I didn't mean you. Generalisation is a dangerous sport. I'm just moody.

But you've got to admit, most forums bastardize what the good ones (like yours) stand for!

Personally I respect your modding - it helped me out - in fact when I posted "link drops" and you deleted them, and then i posted sig links and you let them stay, i realized more about what's "black hat" and what's not... (which has resulted in a HUGE increase in how much money I'll make in 2009 legitimately and almost certainly) so I actually APPRECIATE your modding chrissy, plus that fabulous tune "Soul Limbo" - which I have now got a copy of on my machine!

Not all mods are petty tyrants. You are not - and I'm not trying to flatter you - if I did anything wrong, you'd delete it without hesitation, so kissing behind ain't gonna help me.

I think it's political forums where the mod issue really becomes most twisted - I've actually had a moderator on a politics forum CHANGE MY WORDS to suit her - i said to her at one point (and her little sidekick) "I seriously overestimated you two" - and she removed the "over" part of overestimated. She did a number of things like that - this little moderator person who said things like "you can't have too much violence" - and seemed to refer to any attempt at empirical secondary experimental data gathering as a desire for self-validation. She really annoyed me, and she's not the first. On a palestinian forum an american GI was installed as moderator AFTER the rest of us, israelis, muslims, random atheist sikhs, and others, got together and savaged him for saying that "black people are better at labour", "white people have higher intelligence" and a lot of other rubbish. They made him moderator, dammit! And he banned me from ever going near the forum (so eventually I hacked it and deleted him from existence and then ran a database backup, so that when he returned to the most recent backup it didn't help him... am i devious or what?)

I think chat-zone moderators are more likely to fit the description I put there, rather than people moderating forums where people go to exchange info (or drop links!) rather than to hang out all day and talk about who's bad, whether god is the same colour as atheists and why we even bother to vote for parties when they just do what the hell they like and totally disregard what the public wants.

But honest to god Chris, you're an ace moderator, and I say that as someone whose spam you have deleted, so you know I'm not lying. And when you get cynical and nasty, I think it's very stylish - it's the people who have no brains and use power to compensate for it that really get my goat.

In the end on the 'chat section' of that site with the girl who loved violence she wrote "there was something I had to do today, i can't remember what" and i quoted my favourite david lynch line "Was it practising walking without dragging your knuckles?" and ANYONE with a brain would surely have come back at me with something clever, witty and taking the piss back out of me... but she just wrote "no, it wasn't that".

I just have too much personal history with moderators at politics forums. When you get them alone and they have written you off - they are SO rude and so evil behind closed doors. I've had a "pro-peace" american "palestine activist" telling me to f--- myself... editors, moderators, other 'administrative people' - and then there's people like you and me... developers, creators, producers... making stuff. True, sometimes we do their jobs, but remember - for them that's the ONLY thing they can do, whereas to you and I it's just another extension of computer USAGE - to them it's some kind of "discipline" or "talent" or even "privelege". Like people who think spreadsheets are clever. Have they never written an sql command (I'd say a perl command, but why alienate? And no doubt there's still a lot of good database excellence going on outside the perl universe).

Just my 18 million cents.

Okay. Now tangible evidence of double standards...

the attached jpg shows the forum forcing 3 sig lines of branding down my throat (in triplicate when you join, and probably on alerts and even "happy new year" messages)

then on the thread the man uses nasty words, suggesting that ANY advertising in signatures is "that kind of crap/****" i.e. openly abusive about it whilst in his own emails, sending me TONNES of his brand in my face without ever giving me ANY way to remove the signatures from his messages but keep his messages - it's all or nothing.

That's what I mean. Thus w-t is obviously not guilty, since your ads are EVERYWHERE as I read your site, and you don't stop me putting my brand next to my name as I post, which is reasonable, and I'm sure the majority of sites actually follow your approach - so I'm really only talking about a minority 10% here. The one in the jpg will probably turn out to be part of that minority, judging by the thread in which advertising is labelled spamming and "pimping" - so he's accusing me of selling women's bodies, yet in fact whatever it is I do, he appears to do. So he sees himself as a pimp. Either way, I put my post in - after all, it may not be wiped straight away, I may get 1 customer out of it, or it may turn out the site's bite is not as bad as its bark. Whatever the case, I think it's clear there are double standards - just look at the jpg. Ah jpg. That's a tla I have no prob wit.

If they want to run a private sucky-arse forum, let them plunder in there own self knowing.

However, most logical forum owners will enjoy that you are posting on topic posts and that you make positive influence on said forum, so they will allow you to "justfy" your time with a few simple hyperlinks.

Its just like i said to my friend who liked a girl for a year only to find out that "she likes him as a friend". Take this as a learning experience and move on. The internet/world is filled with "brilliant" people. (Joke.... ) Happy New Year!

Yep I got a private message saying I had been censored, so left this reply, to clarify why it is commercially better for the site to not censor people like me:

On all your emails to me you have your brand in your signature. Not allowing me the same courtesy is hypocrisy. There are other boards I can talk about gaming on as much as I like, with a commercial signature. I'll go and post relevant stuff there instead.

I won't go back to that forum, obviously, but whose is the loss? I'll get my traffic anyway.

Lucky there's such a vast network of wiser unified people out underlying the web - the people who give me faith in my firm decision to make my a.i. project fully opensource (but NOT my business or my money, obviously!)